#547: Chris Buttars

Chris Buttars is a former Republican Utah state senator, famous for being one of the most delusionally insane state senators in the US (vying with people like Gerald Allen, Sylvia Allen, Warren Chisum, Bobby Franklin, Sally Kern, his own colleague Don Larsen, and a few (well, many) others) and a likely candidate in the competition for being the vilest (though the competition is fierce here as well). Buttars was, for instance, the leader of the “Mormon gulag”, the Utah Boy Ranch.

In his position as senator Buttars has attempted to push intelligent design creationism (or ”divine design”, as he has called it), and has instructed the school board to insert language in their education materials asserting humans didn’t evolve from any other species (the bill failed, and Buttars was shocked), and has in other ways sought to undermine education, presumably because he recognizes that education may pose a threat to ignorance and delusional denialism, which creeps like Buttars could not survive without.

He also introduced a resolution urging companies to have their employees say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays” to customers to ensure that the companies would have the religious liberty to express Buttars’s own preferred religious views, and has made some very weird attempts to undermine the church-state separation.

Some of his moves may perhaps be understood in light of his comment that he he “[doesn't] know of an example where the minority is being jeopardized by legislative action.” When Brown v. Board of Education was mentioned Buttars responded that he thought “Brown v. Board of Education is wrong to begin with,” which would not really have been a response to the point in any case. Gays certainly don’t experience discrimination, according to Buttars, and with regard to anti-discrimination measures, he has said the LGBT community doesn’t fall under the same protective umbrella as race, age and religion, which “affect everybody.” Read that again and try to figure out why Buttars thinks the LGBT community shouldn’t be protected.

No, Buttars doesn’t fancy gays. He co-sponsored a Utah constitutional amendment defining marriage as consisting “only of the legal union between a man and a woman,” introduced legislation that would ban gay clubs and gay-straight alliances in public schools, and has tried to remove everything that could ever be interpreted as being gay from Utah. He did take a good swing at the spot for being the most delusional state senator in the US when he asserted that gays and lesbians are “the greatest threat to America going down,” and compared members of the LGBT community to radical Muslims: “I believe they will destroy the foundation of the American society,” followed by “[i]t’s the beginning of the end. Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.” He had to take some flak for that one, though, after refusing to apologize; though his Republican colleagues also refused to say whether they disagreed with the content of Buttars’s rants. Unsurprisingly Matt Barber rushed to Buttars’s defense.

Diagnosis: A terminally ridiculous sideshow monster with few or no reasoning skills. Insofar as he recently stepped down, he may be neutralized as a direct threat to civilization, but there are presumably plenty of people poised to take his place.